Mobile and remotely managed devices such as cellular phones, television set-top boxes, home internet gateways and so forth are becoming increasingly prevalent and increasingly complex. Much of the increased complexity lies in the number and types of application programs that are available on these devices. These applications are produced by many different vendors and utilize different resources on the mobile device. With each application, there are usually large numbers of parameters that must be properly set. The increased complexity of mobile devices has thus led to challenges in properly configuring the devices for optimum use. Consequently, as mobile device technology advances, there is a constant drive to provide consistent application configuration management.
At present, configuration management for mobile devices typically entails a high degree of user interaction with the applications and device, and a potentially high level of interaction with service providers, application vendors, or other third party content providers. This is often a time consuming and frustrating process for many mobile device users.
Present configuration management systems typically include a server component, which sends out the management commands to the mobile devices, and a client command, which runs on the handset and receives and implements the management commands. In some cases, a single vendor may provide both the client and the server, in others client and server will come from different sources. Early configuration management methods required connection of the handset to a service or installation of a SIM (subscriber identity module) card in order to make changes and updates. Such a method requires a high degree of user involvement and is not conducive to propagating changes across a high number of devices.
Central remote management, using commands sent over the air, have been developed for configuration management systems. In this system, a system administrator can use an administrative console to update or configure any one handset, group or groups of handsets. This method provides scalability benefits that are useful when the fleet of managed devices is large in size. However, such methods often require custom installation of modified code that may require different configuration steps, thus possibly increasing the complexity of upgrade operations.
Efforts have been made to introduce mobile devices that are standard compliant. These efforts have sought to introduce some uniformity with respect to device protocols and application implementation. One standard management protocol that has been developed for management of mobile devices is the OMA DM (Open Mobile Alliance Device Management) protocol. OMA DM is generally used by a server computer to retrieve, analyze and set management properties values for the mobile client. The OMA DM specification is designed for management of small mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs and palm top computers. The device management function is intended to support the following typical uses: provisioning including configuration of the device, enabling and disabling of features; software upgrades, fault management, and the like. Use of the OMA DM specification facilitates use with small foot-print devices, where memory and storage space may be limited, bandwidth constrained devices, and limited security devices.
Under the OMA DM specification, mobile devices are treated as managed objects that are exposed within the so-called OMA DM Management tree. Present techniques for configuring such managed objects are based on a set of OMA DM commands that set configuration parameters using device management tree properties. This method of configuration requires detailed knowledge of all management properties unified resource identifiers (URIs) defined within a device description file (DDF) and desirable property values.
What is needed, therefore, is a mobile device configuration system that leverages the ability of the OMA DM specification, but that does not require detailed knowledge of the URIs for the management properties.